The price of success: VMware's big integration challenge

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VMworld 2012 brought tons of new products and enhancements -- creating a huge integration challenge to work as promised

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InfoWorld|Sep 4, 2012

Over the past eight years, EMC VMware has learned how to run a great show, and VMworld 2012 was no exception. Through a combination of luck and hard work, VMware finds itself parked at the crossroads of almost everything interesting that's happening today in IT: the gamut of virtualization, public/private cloud, and user experience management.

He couldn't be more on the money. That's the big challenge for VMware: integrating all its technology pieces and helping IT do the same more broadly.

For example, vCloud Director 5.1 quietly introduced the ability to craft standards-based extensions to the vCloud REST API. That's a bigger deal than it might seem -- not only because of what it can do, but what it says about VMware's motivations. From a practical perspective, the ability to easily and quickly craft extensions (or even replacements) for vCloud's native APIs without having to reinvent common components such as authentication and organizational structure will speed deployment of vCloud-based implementations and encourage more vendors to offer integration with it. But this works only if it is indeed easy and quick.

Such APIs could benefit customers and vendor partners, but they're also critical to VMware's ability to quickly integrate its own products without unsightly bailing wire and masking tape. Although it's not yet clear what will become of VMware's DynamicOps cloud automation acquisition, it's probably a safe bet that chunks of DynamicOps technology will start showing up in vCloud Director -- and these kinds of API frameworks will play a large part in letting that happen quickly.

The success or failure of VMware in the market -- and the success or failure of IT organizations that adopt the VMware infrastructure -- depends not only on the quality of its solutions, but also on how well it can unite them into a single, monolithically managed, extended, and automated set of tools. If VMware can make itself a one-stop shop for managing virtualized clouds, as well as delivering and managing the user experience, it will transcend the happy accident of finding itself at the intersection of cloud-oriented compute, storage, and network virtualization and truly become a force to be reckoned with -- and a key base for what IT delivers to the business.